21–30 of 41 posts
A huge ongoing problem for years, and in particular with recent generations, their ephemeral disdain for history, only existing in the now, discardable/temporary. It's sad, and also losing our history bit by bit, is a threat to our collective cohesion on a longer term scale. You can already see the smaller impacts of this in many spaces.
There's an interesting dichotomy: As a single user, you must assume that anything you upload to the Internet will be there forever, because anyone can download a copy and maintain it. This means users need to be careful about privacy-sensitive information, controversial opinions, etc. But on a broader level we don't actually dedicate much effort at all to maintaining the bulk of what's posted online, meaning most imp…
Or to put it another way - the longevity of something on the Internet is the inverse of what you’d want it to be.
If someone needs that 'thing', they will download & keep a local copy, and then when if it disappears, then someone will ask for it on Reddit and voila! you shall provide.
I read HN almost everyday and when there isn't much interesting topics (to me) I generally start browsing the same day in past years (e.g. I would be browsing 26th of December 2022 then 2021 and so on). Once you get few years back most links start breaking due to various reasons (websites being online, deleting the content, changes in url structure etc). I always thought it was sad, especially when I could see vibran…
Again it is one reason why I wish the history of a browser could take a snapshot of the page I read. At least as a prosumer, opt in feature. I could afford to store those when storage is so cheap.
I've used a extension to do this for last few years. The extension is available for both Chrome and Firefox
I read HN almost everyday and when there isn't much interesting topics (to me) I generally start browsing the same day in past years (e.g. I would be browsing 26th of December 2022 then 2021 and so on). Once you get few years back most links start breaking due to various reasons (websites being online, deleting the content, changes in url structure etc). I always thought it was sad, especially when I could see vibran…
This is one of the reasons Wikipedia switched to Wayback Machine URLs. I wonder if HN could do something similar? Any link more than a year old defaults to a Wayback Machine URL?
I guess that still holds true - then: you can't (easily) contain its availability, and now: eventually it'll just disappear like everything else.
Fans of all that is blockchain will probably disagree with the current meaning, and hold steadfast to the earlier meaning.
Probably a good reminder archive.org has a fundraiser going on right now. It would a sad day indeed to lose access to that resource.
Fundraiser with matching no less. Wikipedia doesn't need any more money, the Internet Archive is a far better use for a donation. And they don't use fake-urgency manipulation to beg for it either.
Having said that, I did donate to them this year. Every year I choose a different site I use often, or a charity that grabs my attention in time, and donate. There are so many, but each year I choose one, and give them a nice lump sum.
It makes it easier for me to contain how much I donate, but also lets me give sizeable donations just the same. I haven't donated money to archive.org, but I have donated code which they did include in one of their topical collections.
I might pay up some next year. But I never decide until it gets close to the holidays, end of year when I have money set aside for exactly that purpose.
Probably a good reminder archive.org has a fundraiser going on right now. It would a sad day indeed to lose access to that resource.
Every lawyer should be contributing. Wayback machine snapshots come up in court shockingly often.
Around Y2K someone was stealing content from my site. I sent a takedown notice and they told me I had no proof. So I used WayBack Machine, which was newish at the time, to show when it appeared on my site, and when it appeared on theirs. I was able to pinpoint within a week when they had stolen the text, because at the time it was being updated quite regularly. I asked, but didn't receive an answer, why they stole it and then took two weeks to publish it without even trying to hide their tracks.
Then I told them I'm writing a publicly accessible article about their theft, complete with the proof I just showed them, and links to the examples on their site, because hey, why not be an awesome example of plagiarism and outright theft in the wild, and how to prove it!
They took it down immediately thereafter, and never spoke to me again. I guess they didn't want the opportunity to be my example.
Probably a good reminder archive.org has a fundraiser going on right now. It would a sad day indeed to lose access to that resource.
Fundraiser with matching no less. Wikipedia doesn't need any more money, the Internet Archive is a far better use for a donation. And they don't use fake-urgency manipulation to beg for it either.
Indeed, my primary use case for JellyFin is to archive media which is likely to disappear. The obscure, the weird, the niche films and TV from decades past - not relevant enough for a DVD release. Some of this stuff, I search for years before finally finding it.